Community mining of high-throughput microscopy screens

High-throughput/high-content (HT/HC) microscopy-based screening provides a powerful tool to discover and functionally annotate genes and biological pathways, by enabling a quantitative study of the specific effect of genotypic disruptions on the phenotypic traits of ‘live’ intact cells. Currently, specialised large-scale image and data analysis methods are needed to produce phenotypic data, limiting such functional genomic annotation techniques exclusively to researchers of groups that possess that expertise. This means that the community is limited in their access to HT/HC data and their ability to further mine it after publication, reducing the impact of the expensive HT/HC screens. Here we present a novel data visualization tool we have begun developing, which enables the functional genomics community to mine published HT/HC screens without computational knowledge. The tool is based on a novel data model allowing the visualization and analysis of extremely large amounts of data. The web interface can be used for querying the data and the results are visualized as plots in real-time. As a demonstration, we use phenotypic data extracted from a fission yeast screen.